Announcements in Userorbit are how you keep your users informed about what matters. Whether you ship a new feature, fix a critical bug, or change your pricing, announcements give you a single place to craft the message and deliver it through multiple channels at once.
What announcements do
An announcement is a structured update that you publish to your users. Each one has a title, body content, optional cover image, and metadata like publish date and category. Once published, Userorbit distributes it through the channels you choose:
- Public changelog — A dedicated page where anyone can browse your full history of updates, sorted by date.
- In-app widget — A small notification badge and feed embedded in your product, so users see updates without leaving your app.
- Email broadcasts — Targeted emails sent to specific user segments or your entire user base.
Why announcements matter
Product teams ship constantly, but most updates never reach the people who need them. Release notes buried in a GitHub repo or a Slack message in an internal channel do nothing for your users. Announcements solve this by giving you a purpose-built workflow for external communication.
When used consistently, announcements help you:
- Build trust by showing users that the product is actively improving.
- Drive adoption of new features by putting them in front of the right people at the right time.
- Reduce support load by proactively communicating changes before users run into confusion.
- Create a searchable archive of everything you have shipped.
How the pieces connect
Announcements sit at the center of several Userorbit features. When you create an announcement, you can optionally assign it to a collection to keep related updates grouped together — for example, a collection for "Platform updates" or "Mobile app." Collections appear as filters in your public changelog, making it easy for users to follow only the topics they care about.
The widget pulls from your published announcements automatically. When a new announcement goes live, the widget shows an unread indicator so users know something is new. You control the widget appearance and behavior from the widget settings page.
For email broadcasts, you choose whether to send an announcement as an email at publish time. You can target the email to all users or narrow it down to a specific segment. The email body is generated from your announcement content, so you write once and distribute everywhere.
When to use announcements
Use announcements any time you want to communicate something to users externally. Common examples include:
- New feature launches
- Bug fixes and improvements
- Scheduled maintenance or downtime
- Policy or pricing changes
- Milestone celebrations
For internal-only notes or work-in-progress items, keep them in drafts until they are ready for your audience.